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Friday, 19 May 2017

'Witch hunt': Trump appears at odds with White House over Robert Mueller

Donald Trump on Thursday said he was the target of the “greatest witch hunt”
in US political history after a decision by the Department of Justice
to appoint special counsel to investigate ties between his 2016
presidential campaign and Russia.

The morning after FBI director Robert Mueller
accepted the appointment to lead the department’s investigation into
Russian intervention in the US election, Trump lashed out in a pair of
tweets.
“With all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign
and Obama administration, there was never a special councel [sic]
appointed!” he wrote in the first tweet. He later corrected the spelling
of counsel. “This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in
American history!”
The tweets struck a different tone from the White House statement
released after the announcement, which welcomed Mueller’s appointment as
an opportunity to resolve the questions raised by his campaigns ties to
Russia.
“As I have stated many times, a thorough investigation will confirm
what we already know – there was no collusion between my campaign and
any foreign entity,” the Wednesday night statement said.

The decision by the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, to
appoint Mueller came after a week of stunning developments, including
Trump’s abrupt dismissal of FBI director James Comey, who was leading the agency’s Russia investigation.
It also followed reports that Trump had asked Comey to shut down an
investigation into his national security adviser Michael Flynn, who
resigned in February after misleading the vice-president about his
contacts with Russian officials.
As
the White House scrambled to contain the fallout from a week of
damaging developments, a fresh series of reports on Wednesday and
Thursday raised more questions about the ties between Trump and Russia.
A report from the New York Times alleged
that Flynn had told the president’s transition team weeks before being
appointed that he was under federal investigation for working, in
secret, as a paid lobbyist for Turkey.
Asked about that on Thursday, spokespeople for Mike Pence’s office
issued a statement that read: “The vice-president stands by his comments
in March upon first hearing the news regarding General Flynn’s ties to
Turkey, and fully supports the president’s decision to ask for General
Flynn’s resignation.” In March, Pence said about Flynn’s work for
Turkey: “Hearing that story today was the first I heard of it.”
McClatchy on Wednesday reported
that Flynn had intervened to stop a military plan to retake Raqqa, the
Islamic State’s de facto capital, with Syrian Kurdish forces – a move
consistent with the wishes of Turkey.
On Thursday, Reuters reported that the Trump campaign had at least 18 undisclosed contacts with Russian operatives, several more than previously reported.

Rosenstein will be on Capitol Hill this week to brief members of
Congress on the circumstances of Comey’s firing. Trump initially
presented a letter from Rosenstein as a central factor in the
president’s decision to fire Comey. Trump then undermined that
explanation by saying he had already decided to dismiss the FBI chief
before hearing from Rosenstein.
Rosenstein will brief the Senate on Thursday in a private meeting, and return to the Hill on Friday to brief the House.
A bipartisan chorus of lawmakers have also called on Comey to testify
publicly in the wake of the report that Trump had pressured him to stop
the investigation into Flynn, a request that Comey reportedly noted in a
memo circulated with senior staff.
The Senate intelligence committee, one of two congressional committees investigating Russian interference, has asked Comey to testify
before the committee in both public and private sessions. The committee
has also sent a request to acting FBI director Andrew McCabe “seeking
any notes or memorandum prepared by the former director regarding any
communications he may have had with senior White House and Department of
Justice officials related to investigations into Russia’s efforts”.

Many are calling for former FBI director James Comey to
testify publicly in the wake of reports Trump pressured him to drop the
Russia investigation. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP
Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and the vice-chair of the
Senate intelligence committee, remarked dryly that lawmakers were
certainly “not lacking for questions”.
“We’ve got questions about the president’s comments about tapes –
secret tapes – we have question about transcripts from the meetings with
the Russians, and we have questions about obtaining former director
Comey’s memo and that’s just Wednesday,” he said.
Special counsel is a position that exists
under a statute that allows the attorney general or a deputy, if the
attorney general is recused, to mount an independent investigation. This
particular provision has been invoked only once before, in the Bill
Clinton administration, when former Senator John Danforth was to
investigate the Branch Davidian siege outside Waco, Texas.

The position is different from an independent counsel, the role in
which Ken Starr investigated Bill Clinton throughout the 1990s. The law
authorising that position expired in 1999.
As special counsel, Mueller will command broad powers, including the
power to subpoena documents and prosecute any crimes, independent of
Congress. Calls on Capitol Hill for a special prosecutor in the
investigation have percolated for months, but spiked after the firing of
Comey, who was leading an FBI investigation into the matter. The
independence of the investigation fell into question after the firing.
Democrats,
who had called for a special counsel, welcomed Mueller’s appointment,
along with a number of Republicans who have come to view the near daily
revelations as an obstacle to their legislative agenda.
But some in the GOP expressed concern that the appointment conveyed the wrong message.
“There should be the most special circumstances when you have an
independent prosecutor – you should have evidence for a crime,” said New
York representative Peter King, a Republican, who argued the
appointment was unnecessary.
“There’s no evidence of collusion at all,” King added said. “Just a rabid press corps and a very intense Democratic Party.”
On a day of fast-moving developments, Richard Burr, the chairman of
the Senate intelligence committee, said a lawyer for Flynn had told the
intelligence committee that his client would not comply with the panel’s
subpoena for personal documents related to the committee’s own probe.

Flynn, through his lawyer, had earlier asked for immunity from
“unfair prosecution” in exchange for agreeing to cooperate with the
committee.
But the committee later seemed to correct Burr’s comments, saying it had not yet received a response from Flynn’s lawyer.
If Flynn were to refuse to honor the subpoena, that could leave him
in contempt of Congress, but the Republicans on the Senate intelligence
committee would decide how far to push Flynn to get him to comply.
“If he’s really saying the equivalent of ‘nuh-uh,’ it’s really hard
to see how Burr can justify not treating that as contempt,” said Josh
Chafetz, a Cornell University law professor and expert on congressional
investigations. “That would be saying that, ‘Every subpoena we issue is
completely optional.’”
“Subpoenas aren’t optional, so it’s contempt of Congress,” he added.
Contempt of Congress has been a federal crime since the 19th century,
Chafetz said.
Before the committee finds someone in contempt, “usually, there’s an
attempt to negotiate and come to some sort of settlement”, said Chafetz.
Additional reporting by Tom McCarthy, Jon Swaine and Ben Jacobs

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About Me

I was inspired to start this when I discovered old editions of "The Worker". "The Worker" was first published in March 1890, it was the Journal of the Associated Workers of Queensland. It was a Political Newspaper for the Labour Movement. The first Editor was William "Billy" Lane who strongly supported the iconic Shearers' Strike in 1891. He planted the seed of New Unionism in Queensland with the motto “that men should organise for the good they can do and not the benefits they hope to obtain,” he also started a Socialist colony in Paraguay.
Because of the right-wing bias in some sections of the Australian media, I feel compelled to counter their negative and one-sided version of events.
The disgraceful conduct of the Murdoch owned Newspapers in the 2013 Federal Election towards the Labor Party shows how unrepresentative some of the Australian media has become.